tmpfs /dev

Bill Nottingham notting at redhat.com
Fri Sep 10 16:30:21 UTC 2004


Russell Coker (russell at coker.com.au) said: 
> On Fri, 10 Sep 2004 06:19, Daniel J Walsh <dwalsh at redhat.com> wrote:
> > You will need to talk to Bill Nottingham about modifying /sbin/init to
> > do this.  They are not crazy about
> > putting additional code into /sbin/init since it is very hard to debug.
> 
> We've done it once, we can do it again.

But why is init any better? Especially when it's just spawning a
shell script - that's a hack.

> > They prefer rc.sysinit.  They also do not
> 
> rc.sysinit means changing the policy for init_t, initrc_t, and maybe others.

init runs in init_t, surely?

> > want to relabel the /dev file system if it is not a tmpfs,  since with
> > 8000 or more files it could take a while and
> > slow down the boot up.
> 
> On the slowest machine I have access to (a machine that can never run Fedora 
> because it doesn't meet the hardware requirements) it takes 12 seconds to run 
> setfiles on a fully loaded /dev.  On machines that are a mere four years old 
> it takes about 2 seconds, I doubt that you will be able to measure the 
> difference that this makes on any hardware that can be purchased now.  But 
> writing some code to check for the file system type is not too difficult.

The code's already written and there.

The reason you don't want to run it on a normal /dev is because
it's *pointless.*

Bill





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